I've had a varied career, starting as a professor before becoming a researcher at RAND. I spent some time at Price Waterhouse and as an executive in various roles at Charles Schwab. I was CIO and VP of Engineering at Google, where I oversaw all aspects of internal engineering, including Google’s 2004 IPO (yes, it was as fun as it sounds)! I also spent a short period in the music industry as president of EMI Music’s digital unit before founding my current company, ZestCash. I’m the author of Getting Organized in the Google Era, a book on personal and workplace organization. Here, you can read my take on innovation and culture, and how the two coincide. Follow me on Twitter @DouglasMerrill

Why Multitasking Doesn't Work

Right now, you might be reading this blog while cooking dinner, watching the news on TV, and riding a stationary bicycle. You’re trying to save time by doing multiple things at once.

Truth is, you’re actually wasting time. Yes, the dinner will get cooked and you’ll elevate your heart rate. But I doubt you’ll remember much of anything from either this blog or the TV news.

Multitasking is something everyone does these days. It’s hard not to multitask, given all the things we have to do and all the streams of information coming at us non-stop.

I know, you think you’re good at multitasking. And to some degree, you are. You can walk and chew gum at the same time. Folding laundry while talking on the phone? Not a problem. A clown can ride a unicycle while juggling brightly colored balls. This form of multitasking works because these are rote tasks that don’t require much brainpower.

Isn’t it madness he can’t be mine? –Chess

Unfortunately, our brains just aren’t equipped for multitasking tasks that do require brainpower. Our short-term memories can only store between five and nine things at once.

When you’re trying to accomplish two dissimilar tasks, each one requiring some level of consideration and attention, multitasking falls apart. Your brain just can’t take in and process two simultaneous, separate streams of information and encode them fully into short-term memory.

When information doesn’t make it into short-term memory, it can’t be transferred into long-term memory for recall later.

If you can’t recall it, you can’t use it. And, presumably, you are trying to learn something from whatever you are doing, right? Instead of actually helping you, multitasking works against you. It’s making you less efficient, not more.

When I was at Google, I attended lots of meetings in which others had their laptops open. It wasn’t that these people didn’t care about what was being said. It’s just that they had lots of other things to do, and juggling several tasks at once seemed like a good idea.

It wasn’t.

Soon it became clear that many people were missing important stuff in meetings. They weren’t paying attention to what was going on around them because their brains were otherwise occupied. So the information shared in meetings never had a chance to break into their short-term memory banks.

Fairly soon, it became clear that having laptops open in meetings was lowering productivity instead of raising it. So we declared some meetings no-laptop zones.

// Side note: Of course, this created an unintended consequence. When people thought they had something more important to deal with, they simply left the meeting. While this was distracting for the others in the meeting, at least it was a more effective use of the escapees’ attention. //

My whole existence is flawed –Nine Inch Nails, “Closer”

Multitasking can be expensive, too—and dangerous. I learned that lesson a few years ago. I was writing a text message on my phone as I pulled up to a stoplight. Sadly, I misjudged the distance between my car and the one in front because I wasn’t fully paying attention. I hit the other car, though no one was hurt. Still, it was the most expensive text I’ve ever sent. And I learned my lesson.

I’m often asked if this is a generational phenomenon. Specifically, “everyone knows kids are better at multitasking.” The problem? “Everyone” is wrong. Their brains, especially the limits imposed by short term memory, are the same as those of adults. Even though your kid boasts she can watch TV and study simultaneously, don’t believe her. If nothing else, learning to concentrate is a skill that will serve her not only with geography exam but also with life.

So instead of reading this blog while watching the news, cooking dinner, and exercising, try something different. Go for a run or a swim. Do yoga. Give your brain a break. Everything else can wait.

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I think it is a gender thing. I’m always amazed when I see a women with three small children, grabbing for everything, in a grocery store, as the mom talks on a cell phone while selecting products from the shelves. However Thomas H. Davenport and John C. Beck deal with the Multitasking Mirage in their 2001 book “The Attention Economy” http://bit.ly/NO2ERc

What is most effective for me is what I call serial tasking. Prioritize what needs to be done and do one thing at a time, giving that one thing all of your attention. Do I sometimes perform two or more rote tasks at the same time? Sure, but for most things, serial tasking works better for me.

Thank you Douglas for this article! Multitasking sounds to me a lot of noise and low efficiency, most of the time. Your article makes the subject very clear, especially about laptops in meetings, and kills the generational myth. Good thing done!

Hi , There is a word called “Conditioning” and i think more you multitask the more you get conditioned . And technically in the example quoted the clown is using more of brain then what you need to listen to the news . Right ? Clown need to use brain to balance , paddle , see the balls , use hands , move arms and give silly expressios as well :) . And for news we just need to listen .

Interesting point Arun. People usually use the word “conditioning” in relation to skill based learning like the clown example, and less in relation to higher-order thinking. Since you can’t change the size of your short-term memory and there aren’t a lot of ways to improve encoding into long-term memory, conditioning doesn’t help much with your email (and comment reading) ;)

I think i am blessed to multitask :) . I spent some time on size of short term memory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-term_memory It reads as below “Further evidence against the existence of a short-term memory store comes from experiments involving continual distractor tasks. In 1974, Robert Bjork and William B. Whitten presented subjects with word pairs to be remembered; however, before and after each word pair, subjects had to do a simple multiplication task for 12 seconds. After the final word-pair, subjects had to do the multiplication distractor task for 20 seconds. In their results, Bjork and Whitten found that the recency effect (the increased probability of recall of the last items studied) and the primacy effect (the increased probability of recall of the first few items) still remained. These results would seem inconsistent with the idea of short-term memory as the distractor items would have taken the place of some of the word-pairs in the buffer, thereby weakening the associated strength of the items in long-term memory. Bjork and Whitten hypothesized that these results could be attributed to the memory processes at work for long-term memory retrieval versus short-term memory retrieval.[6]”

I agree completely! For decades we have had no difficulty in knitting, mending, ironing while watching television – as you say Douglas, these additional tasks required little brain power.

Those of use in knowledge businesses who are participating in conference calls and checking our email or going on writing our reports do a poor job on both fronts – we don’t remember what went on in the call or we don’t hear it at all because we have our attention focused elsewhere.

I am all for concentrating on one thing at a time and performing with excellence rather than spreading our attention across multiple platforms and doing nothing with excellence!

Absolutely true. I had serious problems with memory and attention due to that. I thought it was good idea to switch fast from one thing to another. More than that I had no much breaks as I thought I can save this time. I quit smoking few year ago which I am still very proud of. So, I thought “Wow! Now I can work without waste of time for smoking (breaks)”. Office building was non smoking, so I saved about at least 15-20 mins for each smoking. So, I started working as machine with only short lunch breaks, switching my attention from one task (or email) to another, and so on, trying to do many things at once. After about 6 months I started feeling real issue with short term memory. At worst times, I could not remember what I was doing few mins ago and this is at age below 40. Not a joke anymore. Luckily, it was repairable, yet I needed to change my behaviors completely and go through medical treatment.

So, now I do plan time for a particular task. Even emails now I do in a context of one particular task or project. Tools help here, as I use VisioTask, a productivity project management tool, which allows me to sort emails by tasks and then work with them in one work stream. Tasks themselves I sort by priorities, so that I spend my attention to really important stuff and take the rest off. Trust it help to someone. Vince.